Since Charles Dickens is my favorite author, I select one novel of his to reread each year, and always begin this delightful task on Christmas Day. We Jews don’t usually receive gifts on Christmas, so I love knowing that I shall be treated to a bulging bag of Santa’s goodies the moment I open any Dickens novel on December 25th. There are more treats for me in any first chapter of Dickens than there are in entire novels by other authors.
This year my Christmas novel will be Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. Because Dickens wrote fifteen novels, I have not re-read this one since 2009. I had forgotten that the full title is The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.
Leave it to Dickens to teach us a life lesson before we’ve even finished the title page. Whereas I might have assumed that all our lives contain adventures, Dickens is telling us here that living life and having adventures while we do it can be two different experiences.
I’ve always believed that the best part of an adventure resides in our future, awaiting us as one of life’s exciting bonuses. I never recall thinking that I was in the midst of an adventure, but I often recall thinking, “I’d love to have an adventure.” It reminds me of when a friend whom I am visiting suddenly says “Shall we have a piece of cake?” Eating the cake is always lovely (unless, perish the thought, I baked it), but the anticipation of it beforehand is also rather delicious.
The adage “you can’t have your cake and eat it, too” always puzzled me. I knew its purpose was either to warn those who want it all without considering the consequences, or to point out that it is impossible to enjoy the benefits of two things that are mutually exclusive. But to me, its opposite (“you can have your cake and eat it, too”) always seemed to describe the ultimate adventure: “eating” the adventure-cake by experiencing it, and “having it, too” by savoring both the anticipation of it beforehand and the memory of it afterward.
My definition of “adventure” is not just an unusual or exciting activity. There should also be some hazardous element to it. The truest adventures should be set in unknown territory, all the more likely to be fraught with potential danger. Going to the grocery is a chore; going to Saturn is an adventure.
Perhaps this is why the best use of “Adventure” in the title of a novel is not in one by Dickens, the greatest British novelist, but one by America’s greatest novelist, Mark Twain. He entitled his one immortal work The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and then he set it on the Mississippi River so that Huck and Jim, his protagonists, could literally set sail on a series of risky adventures. Our greatest river carried these two great fictional characters into one unknown territory after another.
I was quite confused about adventures as a child. Being a boy in the 1950’s, I was the first generation of children to enjoy television. The Adventures of Superman premiered when I was only five. How many times did I run wildly in our backyard, arms outstretched, pretending to fly, screaming, “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Super-Elliot!”
I thought I understood adventures just by watching Superman, which was chock full of them. But as a family, we also watched a situation comedy starring the Nelson family—Ozzie, Harriet, David, and little Ricky, who would soon become the heartthrob crooner who captured my teenaged sister’s heart.
Nothing at all seemed to happen on this show; it was the anti-Superman. Husband Ozzie never even left for work. His full-time job seemed to be watching his sons’ humorous sibling rivalries and chuckling “Those boys!”
And yet this show was called The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Really? Why? The only apparent adventure-danger was during the commercials, when the sponsor informed us of the dangerous threat of ostracism if we didn’t religiously gargle with Listerine. I couldn’t wait until the next Superman when Lois Lane would be tied to a railroad track, and Superman would save her by merely putting up his right palm to stop the train dead. Now THAT was adventure!
But maybe the Nelson family show was the harbinger of our modern, modest indoor adventures. Many of us have reached that stage in life when our financial investments provide our most exciting adventures—always risky, transacted in a faraway location, thrilling when stocks are high but nerve-wracking when they are tumbling. The Wall Street Journal once called venture capitalists, those who risk their money on startups in exchange for a stake in the company, “the greatest adventurers of the last hundred years.”
And did you know that when the term “venture capitalist” first came into our language in 1946, it was, in fact, “Adventure Capitalist”? If you are currently bemoaning capitalism’s role in the commercialization of Christmas, may I make a suggestion? Visit your library, spend not one penny, and check out a novel or biography overflowing with adventures. Cut two slices of cake - one for now, one for later. Thus fortified, you can await 2025, which just might shape up to be The Adventure Of The Century.
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here